medieval – victorian clothing for second life

Monthly Archives: June 2015

When I started designing apparel in Second Life Five years ago, I brought with me over 22 years of real life design experience. With that knowledge every garment I created I maintain the four important components of design that have always been my drive, inspiration and muse. They are:
1) Fabric – the content, the texture and mostly the drape and how it interacts with the physics of the body it covers & the surrounding elements turning it into walking art.
2) Style – I was never into “modern trends” I tend to explore the past. Being a true lover of the history of fashion and the amazing stories behind each era, I mix and match years of characteristics creating a unique timeless garment.
3) Color- I love to experiment, I want it to takes on a life of its own. Here I don’t abide by rules, I follow my heart and what please my eye.
4) FIT- this element can make or break a design, if the wearer can’t move in it, if it hangs or pulls in the wrong place the garment becomes nothing more than a dust rag.
It has been an amazing journey to learn how to adapt my skills from working with “hands on material” to “virtual material”. I’m a person that loves “touch”. With only a screen to stare into and a mouse to maneuver the virtual fabric, style, color & fit I was forced to adapt to new way to do things. Although the above “rules” also apply to the new simulated fashions, to achieve the look, diving head first into the world of matrix I taught myself the language needed to get the end results I sought via a computer, a very frustrating adventure to say the least. The scissors, tape measurer, rulers, paper patterns and a sewing machine became obsolete. Instead I learned 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering programs to help bring my concepts to life. Well Life within a virtual world.
Over the summer I’ll take each of the four components of design and the adjustments I learned to achieve a finished virtual design that included all things important to me.
Hope the information can be of use to you;
Solas Na Gealai

News is spreading that two long-running role-play regions in Second Life are to close later this month.

Goatswood (first opened in 2012) and Venexia (first opened in 2011), are the work of Baal Zobel and Kora Zenovka. Both are exquisitely beautiful builds with a stunning attention to detail; Gostswood presenting a small, Victorian-era rural town, and Venexia a Venice-like city of rich and inspiring architecture divided by narrow canals.

While highly photogenic, both regions were created, as noted, for role-play first and foremost, and a huge amount of effort was put into establishing them as such, with extensive back stories to both of them (Goatswood in particular has had a very immersive storyline running through it, in which the town itself is very much a character), scripting and combat focused on the SGS system.